Fluid, sharp writing, deep research, and a spy network with unparalleled ingenuity provide a snappy read and lots of...
Hemming (Agent M: The Lives and Spies of MI5’s Maxwell Knight, 2017, etc.) tells the story of MI6 operative Bill Stephenson (the model for 007) and how crucial he was to America’s entry into World War II.
Stephenson was sent to New York in June 1940, to convince U.S. officials to support England in her desperate fight against the Germans. Later that summer, President Franklin Roosevelt sent Bill Donovan on an unofficial visit to London to discern if England could survive. Stephenson knew of the visit and had MI6 take charge, wooing Donovan with royal visits and access to high-security operations. When Donovan returned to America, Stephenson convinced him the U.S. needed a stronger spy service. Donovan’s job was to get Roosevelt onboard. He was already leaning in that direction, ready to help in any way he could—everything that is, short of declaring war. Helping these interventionists was an East Coast group with strong influence called the Century Group. American isolationists, led by Charles Lindbergh, were their fiercest opponents. Lindbergh, who addressed huge crowds at anti-war rallies and justified Nazi aggression due to economic imbalance, received information from Hans Thomsen, the senior diplomat at the German Embassy in charge of keeping the U.S. out of the war. Thomsen developed the congressional “franking privilege” scheme whereby pro-German material could be mailed to sympathizers by sitting members of Congress for free. He also bribed newspapers to publish his false material. Stephenson and Donovan built the most diverse and extensive yet subtle propaganda drive ever directed by one sovereign state at another. In this page-turning spy thriller, Hemming shows how they mastered the art of starting rumors, infiltrating groups, and manipulating opinion polls. They also used forgeries, organized protests, and wiretaps and hacked into private communications. Their only rule: No rules.
Fluid, sharp writing, deep research, and a spy network with unparalleled ingenuity provide a snappy read and lots of shockers.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-4214-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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